The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to air a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The regulator's report said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the date and wording are determined."
